Public Computing on a Super Scale

The Terascale Computing System (TCS) at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center — installed on Monday — is the second most powerful computer in the world, after ASCI White at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It offers the greatest computational power available today for public scientific research.

The National Science Foundation, which ponied up the $45 million to buy the hardware and software and keep it running for three years, underwrites the supercomputer time — making teraflop-level number crunching power publicly available to researchers around the country.